One senior West Midlands detective – a big cat believer – said: “You can get anything into this country.
“For some years, owning a big cat was something of a status symbol for criminal hierarchy – blame Mike Tyson.
“Some of those pets escaped.”
Have the beasts bred in our countryside? Not a chance. We have proof the animals are – or certainly have been – with us. On February 3, 1989, an Asian jungle cat – actually, not much larger than a domestic moggie – was discovered dead on the roadside at Richards Castle, Ludlow.
There have been others. A puma was shot in Inverness in 1980, a lynx captured in Cricklewood a year later. All are believed to have been on the run from captivity.
The British Big Cats Society claims to have evidence of 23 big cat releases into the countryside after the Dangerous Animals Act came into force. The same organisation caused a storm in 2005 when revealing a puma skull discovered by a Devon farmer. It was a puma skull.
Back in 2015, TV naturalist Gordon Buchanan said in an interview: “I said about five years ago that, with everybody carrying mobile phones with cameras, we will soon have conclusive evidence if there were really big cats out there.
“So far, that has yet to materialise. Having spent some time with big cats, I know they are expert at concealing themselves and hiding, so it is possible.
“But in the absence of hard evidence, I think it’s looking less likely.
“That’s not to say that people are making stories up.
“A friend-of-a-friend showed me a picture of what they thought was a big cat, and I thought it looked like the real deal.”
He said: “It didn’t look like a domestic cat, but when I saw where it had been taken, and paced out the distance, I realised it probably was a feral cat.
“But the way the image had been taken, unless you actually went out there and paced the distance you wouldn’t have realised.”